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1 Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) Two Poems (Edited by Niall Rudd

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Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) Two poems (edited by Niall Rudd) Landor was the last English amateur to write fluently and passionately in Latin. At various points throughout his life his kindly but impulsive nature got him into trouble. He was expelled from Rugby, rusticated from Oxford, ordered to leave Como, involved in trouble in Florence, and (following a libel suit) was forced to leave Bristol for the continent. He made a rather unsuccessful marriage, had a number of affairs, and failed to persuade his life-long love (Sophia Jane Swift) to commit herself to him. He held strong opinions in unorthodox combinations. Though a member of the Church of England, he was critical of the hierarchy, and held that in Ireland the Roman Catholic Church should have the same official status. Though he became a Tory, he was strongly opposed to monarchy, and supported revolutions in France, Italy, and America. His inheritance enabled him to devote his life to travel (especially in Italy) and to writing. He had a small number of close and devoted friends, including writers like Southey, Hazlitt, and Browning, but beyond them he knew many important people, and his colourful personality ensured that he would be admired as a celebrity. Landor was a prolific writer. His prose works take up twelve volumes, and his poetry four (see Bibliography below). But until 1999 there was no modern edition of his Latin poetry. In that year Sutton’s two-volume edition appeared with notes and translations. This could have been an epoch-making work of scholarship; but unfortunately the text (both Latin and English) has numerous misprints, and the translation, though at times neat and idiomatic, is often unreliable. 1 Bibliography: Walter Savage Landor, The Complete Works, ed. T. Earle Welby (Prose, Vols.I-XII) and Stephen Wheeler (Poems, Vols. XIII-XVI), 1927-36. R.H. Super, The Publication of Landor’s Works, London, 1954. (This shows how it is often impossible to assign a poem to a precise date). - Walter Savage Landor, A Biography, London 1957 (with extensive bibliography). D.F. Sutton, The Complete Latin Poetry of Walter Savage Landor, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2 vols., 1999. I From Dry Sticks, Faggoted, 1858 (Sutton, vol.2, pp.58-60) Landor wrote extensively about the Crimean War (1853-6), in which Britain, France and Turkey opposed Russia.The action referred to here was the battle of Inkerman (Nov.5, 1854), which was an important phase in the siege of Sevastopol. Though the allies eventually won, a combination of bad luck and bad management led to appalling suffering. The first and last stanzas make general comments on the disaster as it affects Britain. The others report the details as if the writer was on the spot; he sees the soldier’s death and the effect on his wife as symbols of the general horror. In subject and tone the poem resembles Tennyson’s famous description of the charge of the light brigade, which had taken place at Balaclava on October the 25th. The Times (November 14) spoke of ‘some hideous blunder’. Tennyson toned this down to ‘someone had blundered’, mentioning neither Lord Cardigan nor Lord Lucan. In describing Inkerman Landor, too, avoids names, but with his devastating antithesis in the last two lines he lays the blame squarely on the high command. 2 Amicus meus, strenuus miles, vulneratus Perfusa quanto sanguine hyems tepet Britannico de fonte! Virilium Semper fuisti victimarum Prodiga Taurica Chersonese! Quis vulneratum deferet auribus 5 Nuper relictae celsum animi virum? Pallebit ut conjux sub Haemo Vipereo moritura morsu. Spes insusurret credula credulae Jam Jam reversurum edomito Scytha, 10 Jam Jamque sanandum; salutem Contulerit popularis aura. Equus sed idem non revehet domum, Discerptus ille est sulphureo globo, Restabat ante atque inter hostes 15 Solus eques, medius suorum. Plerosque mortis perpetuus sopor Pressit: quibusdam cara parentium, Quibusdam et ipsis cariora Nomina contremuere labro. 20 3 Sublimiore, o Anglia, anhelitu Nunquam attigisti culmina gloriae, Nec fortiores militarunt Sub ducibus magis imperitis. My friend, a vigorous soldier, wounded With how much blood is the winter being warmed, drenched from the fountain of England! You always were lavish, Tauric Chersonese, with the sacrifices of men! Who will relay to the ears of the woman who has recently been widowed that her husband, a man of such high courage, has been wounded? She will grow pale as the wife did below Haemus when she was about to die from a serpent’s bite. Hope, eager to believe, may whisper to the woman, who is equally eager, that soon, very soon, he will be coming home after the defeat of Russia, that soon, very soon, he is to become better; the general rumour will have brought news that he is out of danger. But his own horse will not carry him home. (That animal has been ripped apart by a reeking cannon-ball.) With the enemy in front of him and around him he was the only cavalryman left from among his own side. Most succumbed to the everlasting sleep of death; in some cases the dear names of their parents, in others names even dearer than they were to themselves trembled on their lips. Never, England, have you reached the peaks of glory with more noble gasps of exertion; never have more gallant soldiers served under commanders more incompetent. Commentary Metre: Alcaic (after the Greek Alcaeus, 7th to 6th century BCE.) 4 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ∪ _ _ _ ∪∪ _ ∪ ∪ _ _ ∪ _ _ _∪∪_ ∪ ∪ _ ∪_ _ ∪ _ ∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ ∪∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ The metre, no doubt, was chosen because Horace had employed it to celebrate Roman valour in his patriotic odes (e.g. 3.2-5, 4.4 and 14); but 3.5 refers to the loss of Regulus’ army in 255 B.C.E., and tells how the Carthaginians sent Regulus to Rome to negotiate terms for the return of the prisoners. Regulus, however, persuaded the senate to abandon the prisoners, and then returned to face death in Carthage, demonstrating that a general should take responsibility for his failures. Elisions: in sanguine hyems (1) the final - e probably disappeared; cf. ille est (14) and the final - a in Anglia anhelitu (21); the same may have happened to the final e of atque and ante (15) and sublimiore (21). But in the final -um of celsum (6) and reversurum (10), and in the final -am of quibusdam (19) the vowel was nasalised and the m was not pronounced. In this last category (and in other cases which do not occur here) the voice, like that of an Italian opera-singer, glided quickly from one syllable to the next. Title The soldier was Major David Paynter, a kinsman of Landor’s close friend, Rose Paynter. For her, see Super’s index. Lines 2-4 The Tauric Chersonese: The Taurians’ peninsula, now the Crimea. According to Herodotus (4.103) the Taurians used to sacrifice any shipwrecked men and any Greeks captured in their raids to a maiden goddess (identified by the Greeks with Artemis); cf. Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris, 38-9. 5 Line 6 Relicta: at this point the husband is known to be dead, but the poet represents the news as being conveyed by stages. Lines 7-8 The conju(n)x is Eurydice. The story of how Orpheus almost succeeded in rescuing Eurydice from the underworld is told by Virgil in Georgics 4.485-502; she had been killed by a snake in Thrace (see the names in 461ff.). Here the Thracian background is established by Mt. Haemus - also in the Black Sea area, though at the western end. Sutton mistakenly identifies the woman as Cleopatra, who in 30 B.C.E. committed suicide with the aid of an asp in Egypt. Line 9 Notice the function of the sibilants, the personification of Spes, and the juxtaposition of credulus credulae (the last being possible only in an inflected language, where the sense is supplied primarily by the endings rather than the word- order). Line 10 Jam jam: the repetition stresses the imminence of the action; cf. Horace, Odes 2.20.9; Epodes 17.1. But Horace does not repeat the expression in consecutive lines. Scytha: Russia. Line12 popularis aura: a phrase used by Horace (Odes 3.2.20) to describe the people’s shifting favour Line 14 sulphureo globo: literally ‘a sulphurous ball’; a striking invention. Line 17 perpetuus sopor: from Horace, Odes 1.24.5, on the death of Quintilius. Line 19 In the interests of metre and sense I have emended Sutton’s carior to cariora. Line 21 Sublimiore . anhelitu: in their note on Horace, Odes 1.15.31 (sublimi fugies mollis anhelitu) Nisbet-Hubbard argued strongly that sublimis is used as the equivalent of a Greek medical term meaning ‘short’ or ‘shallow’, and that the phrase means ‘with short gasps’. In the Loeb volume, perhaps wrongly, I took sublimi to 6 mean, ‘head in air’, describing a coward fleeing in panic, not looking where he is going. Landor seems to have extended that meaning to ‘proud’. Line 22 The o is not elided before Anglia, leaving a hiatus. 7 II From Heroic Idylls, 1863 (Sutton, vol.2, p.152). Ad Psychen cum catello Psyche, nobilis es neque es superba, Idcirco tibi quem petis catellum Committo tenerum: hunc scio fovebis, Quantum nescio, nec sciens faterer Si mollem in gremio sinas cubare 5 Et narem gelidum applices tepenti. Priscum est huic genus (id manet legendum In libris veterum sacris) priusquam Nos essemus homunculi, creatum. Forti pectore saepe militabat 10 Insignis genitor, minus fidelis (Aiunt) conjugio: ut pudica proles, Et constantior ut tibi sit uni, Hanc collo injice sericam catenam.
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